Pandemic pushed nearly 100 million people into poverty

  • Date: 27-Dec-2021
  • Source: Saudi Gazette
  • Sector:Economy
  • Country:Middle East
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Pandemic pushed nearly 100 million people into poverty

HONG KONG — Dipali Roy couldn't afford to eat. She and her husband, Pradip Roy, were garment workers in Bangladesh when the Covid-19 pandemic hit last spring, leading to mass layoffs at their factory. Like millions of people around the world, both lost their jobs in the capital city of Dhaka, where they had worked for years making pants, shirts and jackets. And like countless other migrants, they were forced to move home to the countryside to cut down on expenses. The World Bank estimates that 97 million people across the globe fell into poverty due to the pandemic in 2020, living on less than $2 a day. There has been little improvement since. "Globally, the increase in poverty that occurred in 2020 due to Covid still lingers, and the Covid-induced poor in 2021 continues to be 97 million people," economists at the World Bank said in a blog post earlier this year. They noted, however, that overall poverty should go down this year. "We barely had enough to return home," Dipali Roy said in an interview in Bengali from the family's home, a corrugated metal shack in a village in northern Bangladesh. As the couple looked for new ways